VStar version 2.6 Beta release

Citizen Sky is now officially permanent part of the AAVSO. In the coming weeks we will be moving additional content to the AAVSO site and freezing this site as an archive of the 1st three years of the project. Please visit the new landing page for future updates.

Thanks to the ongoing outstanding efforts of our fearless leader, David Benn, there is now a new version of VStar available for download. This version features additional plug-in capability and lots more documentation on that and other things. Also, if you see a discrepant observation and would like to let someone at the AAVSO know about it, you simply need to click on that observation, click the checkbox labelled "Discrepant?" in the observation details window, and send it on.The easy-to-read documentation for how to create a plug-in can be found here: http://www.aavso.org/data/software/vstar/doc/vstar_plugin_dev.pdfDavid has also done extensive JavaDocs for VStar, which you can get here:http://www.aavso.org/data/software/vstar/doc/vstar_docs/

Thanks to Sara for her ongoing support in webstart deployment to the Citizen Sky and AAVSO web servers, and her ongoing counsel. Likewise, thanks to Doc Kinne for filling that role while Sara was on leave and for his valuable comments re: licensing and about healthy teams. Bikeman, have fun using VStar now that the locale-related number parsing bug has been fixed throughout. The additional plug-in functionality Sara mentioned permits loading datasets into VStar from arbitrary data sources. What I would love to see is people creating plug-ins and sharing them. If a plug-in is popular enough, it could end up making it into the core source code. Making the docs easily available via the links above as Sara has done is a bonus. The online docs available via the Help menu have also been updated in this release, but they are still fairly minimalistic. If you have questions or comments (as Jim did) about this release, just ask. Regards, David